The Last Bright Routes
by bonestrewn
Summary: "It's not what wicked witches do, is it? Curse their enemies to marry them." Though there's a portal between them, Emma and Regina gradually find their way back to each other. Swan Queen. Sequel to Rearranging the Disaligned.
1. Chapter 1

_Note: Hello again! Welcome to Rearranging the Disaligned 2: Electric Boogaloo! Finally we are rejoining our intrepid heroes._

_Some stuff to let you know about before we dig in: there's been a big time jump here – we've moved from the mid-beginning of Season 1 to the mid-beginning of Season 2. That's for a couple of reasons, the most official-sounding being that I had to make an Important Authorial Decision for the Sake of the Story, the least official-sounding being that I really, really hate having to just rehash stuff we already know over and over again. That's not fun, that's reading by rote! However, there will be lots of filling in the gaps as we go along as both Regina and Emma think back on the events both before and after their separation._

_I'm so excited to be able to share this with all of you – it's been sitting in my head a while and I hope it's been worth the wait! As ever, I am so grateful to you for the time you're taking to read this fic. I hope you enjoy!_

* * *

After the curse broke, Emma had to teach herself not to trust the urges of her own body. She would find herself waking in the middle of the night, aching for Regina, and she couldn't comfort herself with the usual platitudes about how it's natural to miss and want your ex-wife; she had to remind herself nightly that her desire for Regina, her so-called love for Regina, were just the constructions of a curse. They weren't real.

She'd lie awake on the bumpy earth in Fairy Tale Funland or whatever the hell the forest was called and fight with herself about it, the way desert prophets in the Bible wrestled with their demons. Even when she reminded herself that she'd been magically cursed somehow, that it hadn't been her fault, she got steadily angrier and angrier at her own stupidity, at her own naivete. When in her life had she ever wanted to get married? When in her life had she ever thought she'd settle down? Stuff like that didn't just come out of the blue; Emma had never dreamed of a white dress wedding as a kid, never imagined an all-American two-and-a-half-bath life in her future. If she ever did, it was before she'd figured out that that life was never hers to live.

She'd been so gullible, so easily led; she'd just given into the curse as though it was what she'd _wanted _- as though she'd been just waiting for someone to come along and take control of her life out of her hands.

Whenever she got to thinking about that little fact, in the dark, creepy nights of Fairy Tale Funland, she would put her arms around her head the way you're supposed to duck and cover from a bomb blast, and she'd stay that way until she fell asleep. Mary Margaret's careworn, anxious expression became permanent as Emma slouched every morning at the breakfast fire and pretended that her disinterest in her food came from missing Granny's egg sandwiches back home.

(It was worse than that, though, Emma realized after a little while. It wasn't Granny's food she missed. It was Regina's. The day she figured that out, she muttered curses to the forest floor and kicked at every rock and root she encountered, and even Mulan gave her a wide berth.)

Mary Margaret - no, it was Snow now, but Emma had trouble saying the name; it was even worse trying to call her 'Mom' - wasn't stupid, and Emma knew that by night three in Funland, her mother'd figured everything out. She just wished Mary Margaret wouldn't look at her with such benevolent, touching empathy. It made her grind her teeth. Comfort and kindness weren't supposed to come so easy; if Emma'd learned anything from foster care, you had to fight to win the right to be loved.

One night, as the embers of their evening fire slowly died, Mary Margaret circled to Emma's side of the camp and sat with her, not touching - knowing with some baffling mother's intuition that Emma couldn't take that - but sitting with her knees to her chest, regarding her with a gentle gaze that made Emma want to squirm.

"You know, I don't think we ever talked about how you came to Storybrooke," Mary Margaret said, batting her eyelashes innocently. "Before Regina wrote you into the curse, I mean."

"You're right," Emma said, determined that if her mother wanted to do the happy family thing, she'd have to deal with the teenage years she missed. "We didn't."

"Would you like to?" asked Mary Margaret, infuriatingly patient.

Emma sighed, resting her hands behind her and leaning back on them, tilting her head up to the sky. She couldn't see much of the stars past the trees, and it suddenly seemed really important that she figure out if the constellations here were the same as at home.

Mary Margaret kept looking at her, waiting for words that Emma didn't want to come. They spilled out anyway. If she thought about her listening audience - her mother, or Mulan across the way, who was cleaning and sharpening her sword with quiet intensity - she knew that her throat would close again, so she pretended to be talking to the stars winking at her through the canopy of leaves above.

"I was living in Boston." Boston had been good to her, even though the weather was cold, nearly brutal after Tallahassee. "I just... Uh, I was thinking about the kid a lot. About how I'd given him up."

The feeling would come to her in unguarded moments back in Boston, the knowledge of the loss of him, and it would tighten around her like a vise. She had no one; she refused to make friends, knowing the danger. Anyone you let close might dig in too deep, and when they pulled away and left, they'd rip out a part of you as they went.

"I asked someone I knew to do some digging for me."

He was a guy she'd met at work, one of those people she seemed to attract no matter where she went - the ones who trusted her despite barely knowing her, who seemed to answer the call of something inside her. Who looked at her with an ally's eyes even when she offered nothing in return. She'd taken the folder of photocopied records he brought to her and put it high on a shelf in the unused kitchen of her apartment, where she forgot about it for a while - easy to do, since she didn't cook.

For work one day, she had to run down some idiot who'd jumped bail on petty larceny. She'd found him gunning it down the interstate with his two kids in the back seat of his car; he was a single father. The day after she brought him back in, she went and got the folder down from her kitchen shelf and looked at it for the first time.

"I didn't want to, you know, take the kid. I just wanted to see him. To see that he was okay."

That was what she'd told herself, every mile on the drive to Storybrooke, Maine. It wasn't Revenge of the Birth Mother Part IV; it was a check-up, a turn-your-head-and-cough kind of thing. She was barely twenty-six and she had so little; she just wanted to make sure that this small piece of herself she'd sent out into the world had made the voyage without harm, the way she herself hadn't. She hadn't counted on how visible she'd be in a town where no one ever came or went.

"I parked outside the school and just watched for him. I had a picture so I'd know it was him. I just... I don't know how I thought I'd know that he was alright. I thought I'd just understand it somehow and I'd be able to drive back to Boston and not care about it anymore."

She hadn't counted on the kid inheriting her curiosity. She'd spotted him from across the street in a sea of schoolchildren, little and pale, Neal's nose on top of her bony face and thin mouth, and was taking deep breaths, trying to convince herself to start the car again and get gone before someone asked her why she was parked in a school zone, when the kid crossed the street - crossed the street! What kind of six-year-old was he? - and knocked on the window of her car.

She remembered his clothes the most about that first meeting, which she thought had to be pretty weird. He'd been wearing a coat against the Maine cold and it wasn't a puffy patterned one like you saw on little kids; it was a coat like you'd see in a men's catalogue, just in miniature. It was expensive. So were his gloves. She couldn't see his shoes from her seat, so all she really saw was the coat and the gloves, and they were better made than her own.

"He crossed the street and started to talk to me. Asking questions. I don't know where the kid got that kind of courage, 'cause..." Emma trailed off, about to say that he'd been born from two cowards, and took a moment or two before she picked up the story again. "Anyway, I guess they hadn't done the stranger danger unit in his class yet."

"So I'm trying to get him to go back to the other side of the street, trying to get him to leave. And then Regina drove up and spotted us."

Regina had appeared like some kind of malevolent angel, wearing a gray coat and a boxy haircut. She'd put her hand on Emma's car door and stood right there and called Graham to have Emma taken away, every inch of her stiff posture radiating protectiveness, like a dragon with its tail curled around its pile of treasure. Emma had been less scared of the arrest than of the possibility that they'd figure out why she'd come to Storybrooke, why it was Henry she'd wanted to see. She could stand anything, even handcuffs, if it meant she wouldn't be cut open and laid bare like an animal on a butcher's slab.

"She had Graham arrest me. I thought it was weird, you know, that when we got back to the station she was the one who asked all the questions?" Emma shook her head and with it shook the memory away like a dog shaking off water. "Anyway, one thing led to another, and I, uh, I stuck around for a couple of days, maybe a week, and after that..." She closed her eyes briefly. "I guess that was when Regina put me into the curse, because the next thing I really remember is being married to her and living in her house."

Mary Margaret's gaze is tender and hot with outrage on her behalf. "I can't believe she did that to you."

"Yeah, well." Emma couldn't believe herself even as she was saying it, but out it came, "People've done worse to me. At least I wasn't... At least she didn't hurt me, right?" She winced and went to cover her face with her hand, forgetting the dirt of the forest floor stuck to her palm.

As she wiped dirt off her nose, Emma shook her head again. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I don't mean that, I don't. I just - maybe it's a side effect, or something, of the curse. Sometimes I hate her so much. Other times, I - other times, not as much."

She tried to meet Mary Margaret's eyes and found that she didn't like what she saw. Her mother reached over to her and put a hand on her arm, saying, "I understand, Emma," and Emma didn't tell her that that was still what she was afraid of. That above everything else, she was scared of being known. It still felt like rolling over and exposing her belly to a knife.

* * *

The next day, as they slogged through the forest, Mulan took point, as she usually did, with Snow bringing up the rear. They seemed to have decided without words that it was better to keep Aurora and Emma between them, to protect the two least warriors of their group. Emma didn't notice until the going became treacherous that Aurora had fallen back and fallen back until Emma was all but kicking her heavy skirts with every step.

"Something you wanted, princess?" she asked, not sure if she could endure another round of probing questions about Storybrooke on this walk.

"That woman you were talking about," Aurora said, over her shoulder. "Last night, by the fire."

Emma gave a heavy, frustrated exhale and silently cursed the entitlement complex of Fairy Tale Funland royalty. It had sure explained a lot about Regina. "I didn't realize I had such a big audience," Emma said. If she'd expected anyone from the other side of the fire to be listening, it would've been Mulan.

"You have a very loud voice," Aurora said curtly, and Emma heard the undertone of "you peasant" in her voice as loud and clear as if she'd said the words. Reminded Emma a lot of her ex-wife.

"Did you have something you wanted to ask me?" Emma asked flatly.

Tension was writ across the stiff line of the girl's narrow shoulders. For a few minutes, they walked on in silence other than their footfalls and their hushed breathing. Aurora said then, "You were married to her."

"Yes," Emma replied, wondering if this was going to be a gay marriage thing, because she didn't even know if Funland had gay people and she really didn't want to have to explain how two women had sex.

"Why would she curse you to marry her?" Aurora asked, and there was something kind of haughty in her tone that Emma really didn't like.

"Listen, princess, I know I'm not exactly in hoopskirts here, but if someone marrying me is so _unbelievable_to you..." Emma took a few long, quick strides, and Aurora had to scurry to catch up to her, saying, "Hoop - hoop-whats? No, Emma, I'm sorry, that's not what I meant!"

Emma sighed and slowed her pace a little, cutting Aurora some slack. "Sorry," she said eventually, begrudgingly. "I'm kind of touchy right now, I guess."

"I _meant_," Aurora said breathlessly, her smooth cheeks flushed a warm pink, "that it's not - it's not what wicked witches do, is it? Curse their enemies to marry them."

"I guess Regina's unique among her people or something," Emma said.

"Why would she do that?" Aurora asked; there was a note of genuine, sympathetic curiosity tucked into the velvet of her voice like a jewel. "If Maleficent had done that to me... I... I'd've died," she added, and Emma shivered a little, remembering the black dragon she'd done in under the library, the fear of an enemy too massive and unknowable to be defeated. She thought she heard a little of that fear coloring Aurora's voice now.

"Break my spirit, I guess," Emma said after a long quiet. "Best revenge she could ever have on my parents, you know?"

"She could have killed you," noted Aurora. "She could have cursed you to sleep."

"Are you trying to make a point here or something?" Emma asked, a little more brusquely than she meant; Aurora was unknowingly prodding a deep bruise.

"I'm just trying to understand," Aurora replied, slightly hurt. You and me both, Emma silently answered.

Mulan had crested a ridge ahead and was waiting, glancing between the two of them as though gauging the likelihood of mutiny. Emma didn't get what she was so suspicious about until Mulan spoke to Aurora rather than her and asked, "Everything alright?"

"Everything's fine, Mulan," Aurora said, and gave her one of those little smiles that always reminded Emma anew that this was a fairy tale princess trudging through the woods at her side.

When Mulan returned the smile, just barely, Emma decided that she hadn't really escaped the how-do-two-women-do-it conversation - it had merely been postponed for another day.

"Are we stopping?" Mary Margaret asked from behind them, startling Mulan and Aurora. "It's still early. We could get in another few miles."

"No," Mulan said quickly, "we're not stopping," and she turned to lead the way, Aurora close by her side. This time, Emma hung back to speak with her mother, who was smiling knowingly to herself, an edge of nostalgia cutting into the grooves at the corners of her thin lips.

"It's the beginning of another love story, Emma," Mary Margaret said softly as they walked on, her gaze not leaving the pair of women ahead of them. "The forest and the two good souls fighting to survive it." She sighed deeply and made a gesture that Emma recognized, reaching to fiddle sadly with the ring she wore, but the pace they were walking was too fast; she had to drop her hands back to her sides.

"Was it like this, for you and my - for you and David?" Emma asked.

Snow directed that benevolent smile to her now, and Emma felt embraced by it. "A little," she said, "but the forest was different then. It was very... Alive." Snow sighed again. "You couldn't walk two feet without bumping into a gnome or a dwarf or a fairy, a woodcutter, a girl carrying sweets to her granny, a royal in disguise, some kind of traveler." She made that gesture, reaching for her ring, but it died sooner this time, and she held onto the bow slung over her chest instead.

"It might just be that I miss it so much," Snow said, "but that seemed like a time when everything was _happening_. There were so many important lives being lived."

Emma thought she recognized that longing, that golden tint of memory; she'd heard it from old men, on the street or in their houses or in nursing homes, talking about the good old days when women stayed in the home and civil rights were just a gleam in the eyes of the oppressed. The nostalgia of someone who never knew who bad it was, because they could afford not to see.

"There has to be a reason," Snow said, more to herself, it seemed, than to her daughter, "why our stories made it through. Why people in the other world - the Storybrooke world - know about Red Riding Hood and Snow White and Grumpy the dwarf and Prince Charming and Rumplestiltskin and..." Her voice grew hushed with instinctual fear, her gaze roaming over the trees now as though a dark shape might spring from behind any one. "And the Evil Queen."

Emma looked out into the trees with her mother, suddenly feeling the size of them, the immensity of the dark greenness around her. She felt small, powerless, and alone; not just alone, but lost. She took a deep breath, feeling the low, slightly chill air of the forest entering her, and thought she knew why she'd been thinking so much of Regina here, why Regina prowled, dark and predatory, across the landscape of her dreams every night.

The Regina she'd loved under the curse had never seemed to inhabit Storybrooke or even to inhabit her own clothes. She was living inside herself, in some lonely place that Emma had never been able to reach. That lonely place, Emma now knew, was the forest. As surely as Emma was lost in the forest, Regina was too: pressed in upon by the trees and foliage, by the way the light suddenly disappeared in the cold of the evening, by the living darkness that stroked its fingers over the back of your neck and convinced you nightly that there would never be escape nor rescue.

The difference was that Emma's forest was real, the kind of thing you sawed down to remind who was master. Regina's forest had no master or mistress. Regina's forest was herself. She lived in all the time in the darkness that was her.

Emma's chest ached suddenly, painfully, and she put her hand inside her jacket and rubbed it, as though the hurt were on the surface and not in her heart.

"Are you okay?" Mary Margaret asked, her gaze lighting on Emma again.

"I'm fine," Emma said, missing Regina more with every word, staring determinedly ahead. "I just want to go home."


	2. Chapter 2

_Note__: __Hello __everyone__! __In __the __wee __hours __of __this __morning__, __I __got __a __message __from __an __anonymous __person __on __Tumblr __who __gave __me __a __very __urgent __kick __in __the __pants __as __to __this __fic__. __If __you__'__re __reading __this__, __thank __you__, __anon__ - __I__'__m __touched__, __humbled__, __and __grateful __for __your __words__. __As __it__'__s __been __a __bit __of __a __wait __since __the __last __chapter__ (__my __apologies__!) __I__'__m __posting __the __two __chapters __I __have __written __all __at __once__. __I __hope __you __enjoy __them__!_

* * *

There was a time right after Regina knotted the curse around Emma, not long after they'd married, that Emma had walked around the house looking at the furniture as though she'd never seen a chair or a desk before in her life. Her hands were stuffed in her pockets the way a child sat on their hands, forcible self-restraint, look but don't touch. When Emma made her third circuit of the kitchen, Regina stopped trying to put together her casserole, and, wiping her hands on her apron, demanded to know what was going on.

"I just can't believe this is all mine," Emma had said. "I mean - not mine. But _for __me_. You know?"

Regina pressed her lips together. "Emma," she said, "we're married now. You live here. You're going to have to get used to it."

"You cut right to the chase, huh?" Emma crooked a smile at her, with an affectionate look Regina could not abide.

"I'm trying to make dinner." Regina turned back to her casserole dish.

"Go ahead." She could hear the impishness in Emma's voice and sighed when Emma's arms wrapped around her from behind, knotting under her breasts. "I'm not stopping you."

"_Emma_," Regina had sighed, but something tugged at her like a fish on a line, and her head dropped back onto Emma's shoulder.

"It's just..." Emma kissed her neck, open-mouthed. "I'm... Happy." There was no mistaking the wonder, the disbelief, in Emma's voice - that she'd known so little happiness she didn't know how to look it in the face now. "I'm really happy."

"I'm happy too," Regina had said, staring straight ahead, knowing it was false. She couldn't let it last.

There was a bereft quality to the house now that Emma and Henry were gone. Even in the months after Emma left but before the curse broke, when Henry hated her with the violence of a little boy who'd learned history from the victors and he'd come and gone as quickly as he could, the house still felt lived-in. A child's sneakers at the door, or scattered, against the rules, on the stairs, a coat tossed where it shouldn't have been, the cushions on the couch askew.

Regina had been so frustrated with these little imperfections, these broken rules. Now that she was the only one left, she ached for them. She wanted some sign of passage in the house, some proof that people had lived there. She left nothing behind when she moved silently through her home.

Her only occasional visitor was Prince Charming, usually to call on her to take care of Henry - happening too rarely, of course, to feel like a worthwhile routine, but too often to do anything but give her hope. When she opened the door late one afternoon to Archie Hopper, she was almost surprised enough to invite him in. Almost.

"Doctor Hopper," she said, pursing her lips. "I didn't realize you made house calls."

"Well, I..." He adjusted his glasses, fumbling slightly. "I don't, usually. It's just that I haven't seen you since..."

"Since Daniel," she finished for him, displeasure spreading in a ripple over her face.

"Yes," he confirmed, not backing down. "I thought I should check on you. I didn't want you to feel that you had to go through this alone, Regina."

Despite herself, she remembered Daniel and the words "then love again," and she'd have liked nothing more than to slam the door in the bug's face. Archie's expression was very earnest, looking not unlike the dog at his feet. She had been trying so hard to forget.

She looked down at Pongo, then over her shoulder at her hardwood floors. She stepped back and let them in.

Archie, habitually fastidious, left his umbrella and shoes at the door and unclipped Pongo's leash. The dog walked amiably at Regina's side as she led the way into the kitchen, where she was keeping an eye on her lasagna under the oven light, dinner for that night and several nights following.

"How have you been?" Archie asked, stirring sugar into his coffee. "When I saw you last, you seemed very..."

Regina glared at him, daring him to finish his sentence. He was not cowed.

"Vulnerable," he said.

Regina stayed standing, unwilling to sit with the bug at the counter like a friend. She nearly wished he'd come in the middle of her cooking; she'd have liked something to do with her hands, so that she didn't have to look at him. Archie's gaze was gentle, but it was also probing; she could feel him looking for the seams in her armor, for the clasp he could undo so she'd swing open like a door and bare all her secrets. What made it worse was that she knew it wasn't for his gain that he did it. He wanted to help, genuine and foolish, no matter how much spite she fed back to him.

"I'd just had a difficult experience," Regina said. "I'm quite alright now."

"Have you used magic since then?" He took a little sip of his coffee.

"No."

"Have you wanted to?"

Instead of answering him, she replied, "What good would it do me?"

"You told me, before," he said, "that magic was always how you'd gotten everything."

"I assure you, Doctor, I don't need magic to get my dinner cooked," she said, folding her arms over her chest, tilting her head slightly and giving him a look down her nose that should have made his words die in his throat.

Archie was, as always, frustratingly resilient, one bug she couldn't crush. "You didn't answer my question, Regina." He regarded her with patient interest, sipping his coffee. "I thought you might be using magic to help David."

"To help David," she repeated with biting skepticism.

"To help David bring your wife back." She was glad she didn't have a coffee cup of her own; she might have broken it. Her habitual reaction to anything at all was to break, smash, and destroy.

"Really," she said. "It hadn't occurred to me." Archie sighed without condescension. "Emma would prefer you say 'ex-wife.' She was very strict on that."

"Would you prefer 'ex-wife,' Regina?" Archie asked her.

Regina leaned back against the counter and tapped out a rhythmic tattoo on its surface with her fingertips. "No," she said finally.

"Then you don't consider yourself and Emma to be exes."

"Your powers of observation, Doctor Hopper, are remarkable," she replied acidly.

Archie, not at all intimidated, took another swallow from his coffee cup. "Why is it that you don't consider your relationship with Emma ended? I thought you two separated months ago."

"Last November." Regina chose deliberately not to look at him. "She and I never divorced." She pursed her lips. "Or - dissolved our union, whatever the phrase is with marriages like ours." She didn't like addressing the uniqueness under the law of their brand of marriage. The closest she'd ever gotten was the sterile phrase 'same-sex.'

"So Emma is still your wife," Archie said, reaching down to Pongo to give the dog a scratch behind his ears. When Regina nodded tersely, he said, his voice gentle with understanding, "It happens a lot when couples separate, that one half holds on tighter than the other. It's completely natural." Archie paused for a moment, carefully choosing his words. "But it does surprise me that you're the partner holding on."

"Call me old-fashioned," Regina said, the most trite and meaningless reply she could muster.

With a predator's clarity, she could see him change his angle of approach. "You were married in our realm, isn't that right?" Archie said. "To Snow's father."

"We discussed this before," Regina said curtly.

"We did," he agreed. "From what you told me about Daniel, Regina, I understand that your marriage to King Leopold was not necessarily - arranged with your consent."

Regina closed her eyes, feeling a headache stir at the base of her skull. Emma used to complain about headaches all the time, and when she didn't complain, she'd rub her head just so, not realizing she was trying to rub out another mark of the curse. The curse that had never been strong enough to adequately hold her, so it dug painful hooks into her head instead, trying to keep a grip.

"I think it's interesting," Archie said softly, "that what happened to you, you did to Emma."

The headache woke in full and stung deep into her brain. "Excuse me?" she snapped.

She could see it in Archie's eyes that he knew the dragon he'd awoken; he plunged on like the best of heroes, this balding, conscience-laden son of thieves. "You took away Emma's personal agency by cursing her, but especially by making her marry you."

"I assure you, she was quite _willing_," Regina said, snapping out the words in harsh gnashes of her teeth; rage pooled bitter in her mouth.

"Because you cursed her," Archie persisted. "You knew she was the Savior at the time."

"Yes," she bit out.

"You knew she was Snow White's daughter."

"_Yes__._"

"You could have done so many other things, Regina," Archie said, his voice so maddeningly without judgment. "Why did you make her marry you?"

"Because I could." She knew what to say, what would make it unforgivable: "Because I _wanted __to__._"

Archie sat there looking at her as her hands clenched into fists. He didn't leave; he only waited until it felt safe for him to speak.

"You wanted to be in control," he said. "Is that right?"

Regina could have told him that all of it, it had always been about control. About seizing the world with both hands and bending it into a shape she liked. She could also have told him that none of it turned out as she'd wanted it to, that taking control had come at a cost and the pound of flesh she owed was still being cut out of her, piece by piece.

He took the look on her face for acquiescence. "What you did was," he explained gently but firmly, "you made history repeat itself. You re-enacted what happened to you and recast yourself in the role of power." He shifted forward on his seat; Pongo seemed to catch some of his master's urgency and rose to his feet, looking up at Archie for a signal.

"Regina, this is a coping mechanism for many survivors," Archie explained to her earnestly; he'd obviously been waiting for a chance to tell her this, as the words came out in one piece. A student unveiling their science project. "They unmake the circumstances of their experience and _re_make them so that _they_ come out on top."

Regina hated psychobabble and hated that through the curse she'd given Archie the false authority he needed to spout it at her. Her chest had started to hurt, aching in tandem with her painfully sore head. For all she cared, her lasagna could have been charring to carbon in the oven; Pongo could have been scarring the varnish on her dining room floor.

"What you're saying is..." Her mouth felt dry and sore; it tasted like the aftermath of illness. "I did to Emma what was done to me." A beat of her heart passed, slower, she thought, than usual. "I'm just as bad as..." She swallowed the end of her sentence, not sure who she'd been about to name. Cora? Leopold? Snow?

She lifted her gaze slowly to Archie. She felt vulnerable, as open a door as he could want, and she didn't like that she had to meet his eyes. If she didn't, she wouldn't know what he was thinking, and she had to know. Despite everything she'd done - her confidence, after so many years, that in the end she would always be the Evil Queen - she still looked at him, waiting for her verdict. Waiting for her sentence.

Archie's gaze was empty again of judgment. What she saw nearly repulsed her, it was so unfamiliar. Not since her father, she thought, had anyone looked at her with care that did not come with conditions.

"What you did with Emma isn't for me to judge, Regina," Archie said. "That's not why I'm here. However... There is something that struck me about your and Emma's... Situation."

She tensed, waiting for the blade to fall.

"Even though you cursed her," he said carefully, picking his way through his words as though over dangerous ground, "even though you took that choice away from her... You still made Emma happy."

"What?" she said.

"You cursed Emma," Archie repeated, "but you cursed her to be with her son and the woman she loved."

Regina cleared her throat. "You're mistaken, Doctor," she said, grateful that this was no revelation, that she didn't have to alter her worldview for the sake of the epiphany he was hoping to induce. "Emma never loved me. That was the curse."

Archie smiled at her slightly and he said, "I don't think that's true."

"Is that in your professional opinion, Doctor?" she asked, and he said, "Yes."

* * *

Regina wasn't given to believing in good news. There was always a catch somewhere, an exclusion clause. Despite herself, Archie's words turned over in her head all through the dinner she wouldn't allow him to stay for; his guarantee followed her up the stairs to bed as though he'd left Pongo behind.

What she thought about as she sat on the edge of the bed and took off her shoes was the election for sheriff, a technicality triggered by her spite. Emma had deserved to be sheriff and she made a good one, though Regina had bullied her mercilessly every step of the way, fighting her on paperwork, protocol, meaningless formalities.

She had bullied Emma during the election too. She wanted to make an example of her. This was what happened when you betrayed the mayor: the life that you had placed in her hands was not your own, the intimacy of the bedroom confessional a broken seal. Emma had told her about prison and Regina gave it to Sidney to print.

That had been cruel.

Up until then, their confrontations had been carried out at a distance. Emma had fled Regina's touch in the study after Graham's death and didn't want to return within reach of her arms. After the story of Emma's jail time appeared in the Mirror, the dam broke.

"You _told_ him?" Emma had thrown the newspaper down on Regina's desk, and Regina, looking up with a deliberately casual air, nearly startled when she found Emma leaning over the desk towards her, closer than she'd thought, close enough to slap or to kiss.

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," Regina replied.

"That was a juvie record," Emma said, jabbing her finger down at the headline. "Sealed by court order. The only person who knew besides _me_ was _you_. You told Sidney Glass."

"How a reporter acquires his information," Regina said, rising to her feet, "is not under the jurisdiction of the mayor's office, Miss Swan."

"I can't believe you told him."

Regina didn't meet Emma's eyes, though she could feel their accusing gaze pushing on her, daring her to confess.

"If you don't mind, I'd like to get home," Regina said, picking up her purse. "I need to relieve the babysitter."

Emma pursued her, stubborn as ever. "Okay, I get it, you hate me now. Fine, that's - I don't even care anymore." Was that a waver in Emma's voice? Unlikely. "But think about what you're doing to _Henry__._"

Regina looked up then as they entered the hall, cutting her eyes hard at Emma, willing her to back down. "I'm not doing anything to Henry."

"One of his parents is running a smear campaign against the other," Emma said. "That's hurting him. He's unhappy, Regina, he's depressed."

At the end of the hall, Regina turned to face her; her voice was hard as she said, "Yes, and I wonder why that is? Did someone leave him, by any chance?"

"I didn't leave Henry, Regina," Emma had said. Regina remembered odd little details about this moment, like remembering the color of the sky on the day of an accident: the lines of Emma's natural frown dragged heavily on the corners of her mouth, and when she blinked, Regina could clearly see her winged eyeliner, which Emma wore not knowing that her mother wore it the same way. "I left _you_."

"Well, you'll have a chance to explain yourself," Regina replied instead of addressing what Emma had just said. "At the debate."

Confusion had marred Emma's brow. "Debate?"

"Yes, Emma," Regina said with an unkind smile. "There's a debate." She turned away and switched off the hallway lights, rounding the corner to the stairs. There was a chemical smell, from the construction, she thought. "You and Sidney can talk about prison and journalistic ethics and perhaps about your new association with Mr. Gold."

Emma's falling under the influence of Gold hadn't surprised Regina when she discovered it. Emma had proved herself surprisingly vulnerable to influence for such a headstrong woman, and she'd fallen from the control of one strong personality straight to another.

"You should be careful who you get in bed with, Emma," Regina said, a deliberate dig. "Gold's a snake."

"I'm not _in__bed_ with anyone!" Emma protested, following her down the stairs, too close for absolute comfort. "I'm just fighting fire with fire."

The door ahead of them had exploded then. Regina had been sure, in that moment of terror, trapped between flames and her own physical helplessness, that Emma would leave her there. She'd even uttered the words. Emma had left her once and Emma would do it again.

Emma, as usual, defied expectations. Regina had thought at the time that it was merely the pressure of her wife's conscience.

Now she tried to look at it differently - all of it. At the time, when she'd felt the curse unraveling strand by strand, she'd been convinced that it was only a matter of time before Emma's illusion of love unraveled too. She imagined it threadbare as old velvet, worn down by all those petty injustices she'd inflicted on Emma, this close to tearing apart.

Emma had loved her, all that time. Had genuinely loved her. Even when Regina had shamed her like a puppy for wanting her freedom, had frightened, manipulated, hurt her, Emma had loved her.

That wasn't what she'd wanted.

Regina, buttoning her silk pajama top, looked over her shoulder at the empty side of the bed where Emma had slept. There used to be an indent there, the shape of Emma's body, like there used to be a soft curve in one of the cushions on the window seat - a sign of Emma's passing. Regina reached over and smoothed her hand down the sheets, feeling the mattress, unmarked now. Her body held the memory of Emma as surely as the bed did, waiting for Emma to return and reshape them both.

Emma hadn't been the first to mark her so. Regina was smooth on the surface, but her scar tissue ran deep beneath the skin, and so much of what she did was to fight the pain of the wounds no one else could see.

There were a few buttons left at the collar of her shirt, and, unthinking, Regina tucked her hand inside the pajama top, over her soundly aching heart. She rubbed her chest as she thought about the possibility, not of healing, but of learning to live with the pain, without violence. It wasn't something she could do alone. She wanted Emma.

Guilt sank in her like a stone. She wanted Emma, but didn't deserve her. She didn't know how to deserve her; the part of her that could be a gentle lover had been dead a long time.

But then, she'd thought the same about the part of her that could love at all, and she loved Henry. If she could redeem herself for Henry, she could redeem herself for Emma, even if it took twice as long, even if it was twice as hard. She had promised Henry she would change, and she silently uttered that same promise to the Emma that lingered in her memory on the opposite side of the bed. She _would_change. She would be worthy of her wife and her son.

And tomorrow, she would go to David and she would help bring Emma home.


	3. Chapter 3

When Emma climbed out of the wishing well and heard the kid say, "Mom!" she wondered what Henry was doing here, and why he was calling to Regina when it was clearly Emma that was doing all the hard work. Then she was staggering to her feet and the kid was crashing into her, hitting her right in all her sore muscles, and she held onto him, pressing her face down into his hair and wanting to cry at the smell of shampoo and fresh laundry and ink. He was still her son, after all that, still Henry; she was the one who had run the gauntlet, who had entered the labyrinth. He wasn't the one who had changed.

She lifted her head and asked him, "What happened?"

"She saved you," Henry said, and he looked away from her, to a figure looking very small against a tree, wan and exhausted.

Regina was different from the last time Emma had seen her. There was a narrow, sallow cast to her eyes and mouth; her hair was longer, skirting her shoulders. There was a glassy vulnerability in her eyes that Emma nearly didn't recognize, it was so unfamiliar.

"Welcome home," Regina said, smiling like she was trying to hold something back.

"Thanks," Emma replied, wondering when the last time she'd thanked Regina for anything was, wondering when they'd last been civil.

The forest here felt safe, clean, and open, not like the Funland forest, but Emma could still feel that lingering darkness in her chest, matching the dark cold of Cora's gaze at Lake Nostos, like swimming at midnight. She didn't have the words to tell Regina that she'd been to the place that made her, seen the woman that raised her, understood her maybe a little. She wasn't really eloquent as a rule.

Emma said, doing her best, "Your mother, uh." She tipped her head down and rested her cheek on top of Henry's hair, squeezing him tight as she looked at Regina. "She's a real piece of work, you know?"

Again that tight smile. "I know," Regina said with a nod.

They went back to Gold's to rescue Prince Charming, a cute little reversal of roles that seemed a fitting, picture-perfect ending to their time in Fairy Tale Funland. The kiss of true love spreading golden light everywhere. Emma held Henry very close and very tight until someone suggested they all go to Granny's to eat, and she let him go then. "I'll be there in a few," she said, and she stayed behind with Regina.

The air was heavy with expectation between them. Regina seemed deeply strained, looking as though she was being silently twisted out of shape, and Emma didn't know what to say; she had braced herself to feel what she had felt from Cora back in that place, the lapping at her feet of a killing tide, or even for those tongues of hot fear that had curled over her before in Regina's presence.

Emma felt like she had met a dozen different Reginas, a multitude of women wearing the same face. The Regina she'd met that first day outside of Henry's school, tense, protective, a mother who loved her son so keenly she cut herself on the edge of it. The Regina who needed control so badly that she took away Emma's car, clothes, job, freedom, who pulled at her misguided loyalty like a leash and rubbed her face in it like an animal when she didn't obey. The Regina she now knew had once wielded life-and-death powers, who had been a queen, who had been manipulative and ruthless. Who had scared the living crap out of her.

The Regina she knew from moments of brief uninvited intimacy, when the hard adversarial mask had fallen away and tenderness pulled uninvited at the tired curve of her expressive mouth.

That was the Regina she saw now, and it wasn't the Regina she'd been expecting.

"Can I use your shower?" Emma said.

"What?" The look of surprise on Regina's face was almost unfamiliar. Emma could count on one hand the number of times she'd caught her off-guard like this.

"Your shower," Emma repeated.

"What, _now_?" Regina said incredulously.

"Yeah," Emma said, not knowing she was going to until she said it. "You've got that, you know, that fancy showerhead -"

"Fine," Regina said, frowning at her in confusion. "Miss Swan, I - don't you think there are more _important _things we should -"

"Maybe when I smell a little nicer," Emma replied.

Emma didn't know what had possessed her to do it, aside from an honest desire to get clean. She couldn't shake that forest feeling, the clamminess in her chest that tasted like wood smoke when it rose up her throat; not sure if Regina was feeding it, she kept a safe distance on the way to the house, hands in her pockets. She was kind of regretting the impulse as they went up the front walk; Mary Margaret had been clingy since the whole finding-out-they-were-mother-and-daughter thing, and Emma hadn't told her she'd be taking so long. Would Regina text Mary Margaret if she asked? Did Mary Margaret even have her phone? Did Regina have Mary Margaret's number?

She forgot about Mary Margaret when she stepped back into the house, which felt empty, not at all like the place where she'd lived. She realized why she'd wanted to come here: the sterile, clean lines, the deliberate, well-chosen furniture. It was as anti-forest as you could get. Nothing heavy and close and dangerous here. The late light of the day spilled in from the window over the stairs and Emma took in a breath of it, exhaling Fairy Tale Funland out.

"Thanks," she said to Regina. She turned and went up the stairs, hearing Regina's footsteps follow then stop, staying where she was on the first floor, watching her. Emma didn't turn and look.

Emma decided, when she was getting out of her gross, dank clothes, that she'd take a bath instead; there was still all the bathroom stuff, stacked where it always was, Regina's expensive lotions and the lavender scent thing you were only supposed to use a drop of at a time (just to spite her, Emma poured some in as the hot water ran), the toothbrushes by the sink: Regina's purple one, Emma's red one, Henry's electric Marvel-themed one with the colorful bristles and the battery-thick base. Stepping out of her jeans, Emma felt something fall inside her, a sadness swoop through. Did Henry even live here anymore? And it had been months since Emma left - had she been keeping this stuff all this time?

Emma, naked, looked for and found a bottle of the body gel she'd always used, the sensitive skin kind that didn't have much of a smell. If she'd been Regina, she'd have tossed this stuff long ago, vented her rage on all the harmless domestic details that reminded her of what was gone.

With Henry, she guessed, Regina'd had to keep up appearances. Make it seem like Emma would come back at any time so that he didn't get upset. More upset. (He'd been so torn up about it - wouldn't talk to Emma for weeks because she left him behind, and she'd ripped at herself nightly about it, for doing the pragmatic instead of the heroic thing, leaving him behind with the woman who had custody.)

She climbed into the tub when it was nearly full of scalding, floral water. Color rushed up her limbs as she came up to temperature, pinking like a lobster. She dipped her head below the surface, brought it up again, found soap and loofah and began to scrub; suds floated over the surface of the water like islands.

The water was a little cooler when she was done; she sank against the back of the tub to enjoy the warmth, closing her eyes slowly. There was no seam between waking and sleeping, and she didn't dream.

A hand smoothed over Emma's cheek, and she knew it was Regina. This was one of her more benign gestures of affection, not like the leash thing she did with Emma's hair.

Emma, her eyes closed, sighed, tilting her head into the warmth of Regina's hand. The water in the tub had lowered, it felt like, and her breasts were exposed to the cooler air, her nipples prickling. What she wanted, she decided, was to get out of the tub and put on one of those warm robes Regina kept around, the only clothing choice Emma had ever agreed with. She wanted Regina to help her towel off and then help her _into _the robe, actually. Then she wanted to go to the bedroom and she wanted Regina to brush her hair.

"One hundred strokes," Regina'd said to her once, witnessing Emma tie her hair back damp and unbrushed. "Miss Swan, you take very poor care of your hair."

"Okay," Emma had said. "If it means so much to you, _you _brush it a hundred times," and Regina had. That was before Regina'd made her quit her job, though.

And before she'd sold the car and kept her in the house. Before Graham... Emma frowned deeply. Before...

Emma startled, splashing water up the sides of the tub, and Regina pulled her hand back as if from a fire.

"Emma -"

"Don't _touch _me!"

They stared at each other from opposite sides of the bathroom for a few seconds, neither moving. Regina, her hand cradled against her chest like she really had been burned, had that sallow look to her again, bleached and tired and kind of sick. Emma pressed herself against the far side of the bathtub, arms wrapped around her chest, not sympathetic.

Regina closed her eyes slowly and said, "I'm sorry."

"Okay," Emma said, and when she didn't continue, Regina opened her eyes again, confused. Emma just looked at her, hard.

"It's been - nearly an hour," Regina said. Emma had the weird feeling that she was making Regina uncomfortable, putting her in that unbalanced state that made people talk without prompting, trying to explain themselves, a reaction that had come in useful when she was sheriff. "I came to check on you. I didn't realize you were asleep."

"So you came up here and thought you'd cop a feel," Emma said, trying to sting Regina into anger and defensiveness, anything other than this.

Instead of getting angry, Regina said, "Is that what you think of me?" There was an edge in her voice, but no volume.

Emma wanted to say no. In all of this she'd never been interested in revenge, never wanted to hurt Regina, and the truth would scald and scar her if she said it aloud. Emma might not have been malicious, though, but neither was she a liar. Not anymore. "Yeah. Yeah, I kind of do."

Regina's head tipped forward, her eyes closing, her lashes laying dark on her cheek. Emma waited for some retaliation, for some blow to come, but it didn't, except in the bitterness of Regina's voice as she said, "I understand."

Emma counted the thump of her heartbeat in her ears to mark how long Regina stood there. She had her head down like she could barely hold herself up anymore.

"I brought you clothes." There was a stack of folded things from the wardrobe Emma left behind.

"Okay," Emma said. "You can go now."

When Emma came down the stairs again in bare feet, the house seemed empty to her, soundless. She remembered the feeling from blank afternoons with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and tugged in discomfort on the hem of the blouse she was wearing. It was one of the satiny things Regina had bought for her when they got married. It felt like she was back in that time again, walled into the house like a Victorian plot device.

"Regina?" she called, even though it was against the rules to raise your voice in the house.

Her ex-wife materialized from the crook of hallway that led to the kitchen. "Did you want something, dear?" she said evenly.

"Thought we agreed we had stuff to talk about," Emma said, hooking her thumbs into her belt loops, an echo of the hands-in-pockets gesture she'd inherited from Regina.

There was a kind of flicker in Regina's expression Emma couldn't identify. "I thought you might prefer to leave," Regina said.

"Nah, I'm gonna yell at you a little first," Emma said, approaching her. The way Regina leaned back slightly as she came closer wasn't gratifying.

"By all means, yell away, Miss Swan," Regina said. "I assure you, you're not the first to do so in recent days." Her clipped, formal voice told Emma of her discomfort; Emma wanted to press a little, to wield that power, but didn't like the flavor of it. The point wasn't to get her own back, not like that.

"I liked it better before the curse, you know," Emma said finally after letting silence hang between them a touch too long.

There was a sardonic skew to Regina's mouth as she said, "Did you."

"I felt saner," Emma said, and she moved past Regina into the pale, well-lit kitchen. "I felt... Safe."

"Safe," echoed Regina, as though the word tasted unfamiliar. "Here?"

"Yeah." Emma slowly made a half-circuit of the counter, trailing her hand along the top, feeling the tiled chill. "This was my home, you know? I'd never had a home before." She rested her palms flat on the countertop, her jaw clenching, and fought the flare of anger that suddenly burst in her, an irrational anger, at the curse and at her ex-wife. Why did it have to be magic? Why couldn't she have had something real for once in her life?

"It can be your home again."

Emma, startled, looked up; Regina had done that soundless approach thing, like a hunter, and was standing close.

"It can be your home again," repeated Regina, looking intently at her. "Yours and Henry's - a-and - mine." There was a defensiveness to her beautiful broad face, a kind of stiffness in jaw and brow, but there was also some kind of tenuous _something _in her deep agate eyes that tamped down Emma's desire to maliciously laugh.

"I'm not the same person I was," Regina said, then, oddly, gave a little quake of a sound, kind of a chuckle but not really. "How _trite _that sounds." Her voice was thin and bitter. "Emma..." Regina reached up to caress her face and Emma gave a little twitch of movement away; Regina, undeterred, stroked her cheek, then slid her hand slowly down and around to settle in the wet hair at Emma's nape.

Emma felt it, that _give _in her, and she did all but go limp. Her lips parted and she took in a deep breath and she felt so helpless that it might as well have been six-odd months ago, she might well have been in her window seat, her prison cell.

"I am _trying_," Regina told her; her gaze was feeling and urgent, but her hand was still on Emma's neck. "To be worthy of Henry. To be worthy of you. Whatever may come, I cannot - _cannot_- go back to what my life has been in these past few weeks - these past few months."

Regina pressed closer; God, were those tears in her eyes? "Doesn't this feel right?" Regina asked her. "Doesn't this feel safe?"

Emma felt the truth well in her again like necessary poison. She told Regina, "No."

The hand in her hair opened in surprise and in hurt. Whatever unnameable tenderness was glimmering in Regina's eyes snapped and fell away as she took a step back, then another. Putting the distance back between them.

Emma watched Regina, waiting for her to say something nasty or hard or mean to cover the crack in her armor, but it didn't come: Regina's lips moved a little, the way they sometimes did in sleep, mouthing things from some distant unknowable part of herself, but it was like she couldn't make herself speak. Like Emma had knocked all the words out of her.

"Look..." Emma slowly lifted a hand and went to run it through her hair, catching herself when she remembered that it was still pretty wet. "Next time you want to touch me," she said. "Ask permission."

Regina blinked, brought back to herself by what had to sound like a non sequitur. "What?"

"Next time you want to touch me," Emma repeated slowly, "ask permission. Ask my permission and I'll tell you yes or no."

"Al-alright."

Emma rubbed the back of her neck. She couldn't believe that trick still worked, that all it took was a touch. Regina should have traded notes with Hook, he'd have found it handy. (She suddenly wanted to laugh at that thought. Haha. Get it. Hook. _Handy__._ It felt more like hysteria than humor.)

"Look, Regina," she said, not looking at her, "I get that - that you miss me, and stuff, and whatever, I've missed you too."

Regina's tentative "You have?" Emma crushed under the weight of her flat response: "Yeah, I got used to you since you forced me to marry you and all."

Something like a flinch flickered over Regina's face, but she didn't reply.

Emma tried to look her in the eyes, but her courage failed her at what she saw there; her gaze skittered over the rest of the kitchen instead. After a minute, she reached to the arrangement of apples on the counter and picked one up, tossing it from hand to hand.

"If Mary Margaret knew I was talking to you about this, she'd flip," Emma said, to the apple rather than to Regina. "You know, she - she thinks that there's nothing to talk about. To discuss. I don't know." She holds the apple still for a moment. "I want to, you know, agree with her. I want to - to close the book on it all, every minute I spent being your wife."

"But I can't." Emma turned away and put the apple back in the bowl. "I really can't, Regina. I - I can't change what you did and how it changed me." Her head dropped forward; she put her hands on the edge of the counter. "Playing like we were never married... That's playing like I was never Henry's parent. Like I... Like I never cared about you at all."

Emma dared to flick her gaze up to Regina, but her ex-wife's face was a cipher. "You said you can't go back to how it was," Emma said. "For the past couple of weeks. Regina, I can't go back to how it was for the past couple of _years__._ Those were years of my _life__, _Regina." There was her anger again, and she was grateful for it; how much simpler it was than the mixture of need and regret and distaste she was feeling. "You took them from me."

"I did," Regina acknowledged quietly. "I have a habit of taking what isn't mine, Miss Swan."

"I don't get it," Emma said with honest urgency; this time, it was her who cautiously crossed the distance between them, closing the gap so that she could look into Regina's face, see everything and not miss a moment of it. "Regina, why did you do it?"

"Because I could, Emma," Regina said, looking up into her eyes; she had the air of someone repeating a script. When Emma couldn't quiet the noise of incredulity she made, Regina said with a little of her familiar sharpness, "Were you expecting something more dramatic? I'm sorry the truth doesn't _satisfy_ you, Miss Swan -"

"Jesus." Emma shook her head. "So, you cursed me to be your wife, right - and all that shit you pulled - you did it just because you could."

"Yes." Regina's voice was small. Emma thought she could hold it in the palm of one hand if she tried.

"Keeping me in this fucking house and throwing out my clothes and taking my car away and - and that night, when you made me - all because you _could_." Her voice was getting louder, too loud for their closeness.

Regina looked up at her again and there was something on her face that was deep and raw and grieving. "Miss Swan, rest assured that I'm not _proud _of what I did to you," she said. "When I think of - of -" she shuddered deeply and Emma felt the pull, the need, wanting to reach out to her, but she didn't.

"What I remember most of all," Regina said, like every word was the impact of a thrown stone, "is the shame_._"

Emma frowned a little, blinking, pulling back. "From -"

"From when..." The words ground out slowly. "It happened... To me."

"Oh." Emma felt pulled in two directions, towards Regina in sympathy and away from her in righteous anger. "Then _why _-" she was getting louder. "_Why _did you -"

"In case you couldn't _tell_, Miss Swan," snapped Regina, looking Emma hard in the eye, "I was not _ennobled _by my suffering. It merely _hurt_."

Emma's lips parted, then closed again. "Yeah," she said, gradually, feeling as though Regina were a book she'd finally read to completion. "I understand."

Emotion pulled hard at the corners of Regina's mouth and Emma felt it again, wanting to move forward, to comfort her wife. She didn't. "I'd like an apology," Emma said eventually.

"I'm sorry." The words came out of Regina like she'd been waiting a long time to say them.

"Okay. That's a start."

Regina stood there, looking like her body was one big ache, and she said, "May I touch you?"

"Don't - don't kiss me." Emma swallowed. "And - don't do that thing with my hair."

Regina shook her head and stepped forward, one small movement, then another, her arms clasped around herself, and then leaned forward just a little to rest her cheek against Emma's shoulder, closing her eyes. Too proud and too hurt and too knowing to ask for a hug.

Something surged in Emma, a hot roiling mess of want and not-want. To kiss Regina or to shake her? To hold her or to push her away? Her arms came up as though on strings and wrapped around Regina. Regina's arms opened and she took fistfuls of Emma's blouse, swaying into her.

"This is so fucked up," Emma said, her eyes closed. "Jesus, we're so fucked up." There was an answering nod against her shoulder, and she could hear Regina's voice in her head like the voice of her conscience, commentary conjured by her own messed-up mind: _That__'__s __marriage__, __dear__._


	4. Chapter 4

_Note: You know, I'm starting to realize that not a lot actually happens in my stories... Anyway, here's chapter four, hastily uploaded before I scamper off to class. I'm sorry for the wait! I have a great deal of the next chapter already worked out so hopefully I'll be quicker next time. Thank you so much for your patience, and for taking the time to read._

_P.S. Emma's a fucking bowl of soup._

* * *

"I don't normally do this kind of thing." Emma accepted the coffee cup. "... Changing someone with my love."

Regina parted her lips to tell Emma that the very notion was foolish, but her breath hitched when she realized that Emma had said "love." She wasn't sure Emma had noticed the way her words died before they began, but to be safe, she turned away slightly, disguising her hesitation with a pull from her own coffee. She'd have preferred wine.

"Dear," Regina said, "I wouldn't want that for a moment." She added, "Doctor Hopper says that _change comes from within_," this with a little upward twitch of her brows, the very faintest shadow of a deprecating smirk, playing at mockery they both knew was false.

"Yeah, that sounds like something he'd say," Emma acknowledged, putting her gaze at the bottom of her drink. "Look, I -" Emma cleared her throat. "There's going to be a party tonight, for me and Mary Margaret. Since we came back."

"There is," Regina said, not giving Emma the benefit of a real response, something to work with. When Emma gave her another look, Regina tasted apology, but didn't let it pass her lips. She was still in the adversarial habit, for all her promises to be different. Still not wanting to let Emma gain ground, especially not after the previous night, when she'd laid herself so bare.

"I want you to come with me," Emma said, now looking very hard at Regina, daring her to say the wrong thing.

Regina opened her mouth. Closed it. She hated second-guessing herself. "I'm not sure that would be wise, dear," she said.

"Henry'd really like it," Emma replied, with an attitude of throwing her cards down onto the table.

"That is _not_ fair," Regina said immediately, provoked into fresh defensiveness.

Emma looked only moderately chagrined. "Sorry," she said. "He would."

Regina took in a deep sigh and this time turned her whole body away from Emma. She supposed this was payback for all of her own little manipulations, wasn't it?

"Emma, you seem to forget that you're inviting me to join a roomful of my enemies. And Henry - he's - not happy with me."

"He still loves you, Regina," Emma said, as though Regina could ever be sure of that again. "You're his mother."

"Yes, but you're the Savior," Regina said, and she put some teeth into it, each word with a cutting edge.

When Emma said, "I'm sorry," Regina could almost hear the face she was making, imagining the slim mouth pursed with reluctant regret. "I can't change that he thinks I'm - that I _am_ -" Emma made a sound like a disgruntled horse, and Regina almost smiled.

"It sounds really stupid when I say it out loud," Emma admitted, and Regina felt a physical closeness, stiffened slightly. "Uh... Is it okay if I touch you?" Emma added, because it had never occurred to her, it seemed, to not extend Regina the same respect that Regina now gave her.

Regina hated that it took the smallest kindness to make her weak. All the same, she couldn't bring herself to deny Emma. She'd waited long enough. "Yes."

Emma's hand rested, solid and comfortable, on Regina's shoulder. "_I'd_ like it if you came to the party," she said, and she actually rubbed Regina's shoulder gently with her thumb, a little gesture of sympathy perhaps learned from her over-affectionate mother. "Look, if you feel uncomfortable when you're there, or - or if Granny tries to shank you with a spatula, we'll leave. Okay?"

Regina sighed again gradually, not sure if it was Emma's touch or Emma's words easing the resistance out of her. She began to tally up the most likely guests - Thing One and Thing Two, naturally, completing their little I-will-always-find-you ceremony; the wolf and Granny. The dwarves. Archie, like as not. Her lips pursed as she thought about what had happened over the past weeks of waiting for Emma, and how David and the bug had stood witness to her most recent near-breakdowns. The knowledge was even more bitter than her coffee.

She could just picture it, one of them - David, most likely David - casually letting slip about what happened. Oh, yes, she could just see the arrogant stance he'd adopt as he told the story, the look of pity for the fallen queen, crying mascara tears into the collar of her white blouse.

"I don't know, dear," she said, rather than tell Emma the truth. "Perhaps it's selfish of me, but I don't want to get within strangling distance of your mother."

Emma sighed. "She's not going to strangle you if I'm there."

"Oh, _I'm_ not the one who's going to be strangled."

"Was that a joke?" Emma's voice cast brightness and warmth on her like sunshine, and Regina was glad that Emma couldn't see her smile, not wanting to give her ideas. "Did you just _joke_?"

"You'll find that I'm full of surprises, dear," Regina said, unable to hide the thrum of pleasure in her voice. Whatever had made Emma happy at the very beginning, she still had it.

"I want to hug you," Emma said, so plainly that Regina wasn't sure she hadn't imagined it. People did not dole out affection to her with such generosity.

"I never thought of you as the hugging type," Regina said, realizing belatedly that it was only the Emma of the past half a year or so who was stingy with her affections - the Emma that had almost right away started calling Regina her "ex-wife." There hadn't even been a formal split. Regina'd never signed any papers.

The unpleasant taste of regret returned fresh to her mouth and wasn't helped by the swallow of coffee she took. Emma, sensing the change, said, "Regina?" but even as much as Regina wanted to vent her sudden, close displeasure, she knew that it wasn't Emma's fault and she'd only be _angry_ with herself afterward. She was trying to keep Emma, not drive her away.

Regina missed the person her wife had been under the curse and despised the thought so immediately that it did all but hurt, almost a physical pain, so briefly real that she wasn't sure for a moment that she hadn't bitten her tongue or the inside of her mouth. No, she insisted silently. She didn't miss Emma being cursed. It was... It was the easiness she missed, being able to have her way without explanation. If this little exchange had taken place a year or two before, she could have walked away from it, or even turned to unleash herself on Emma without real consequence. They would have fought for a little while and then gone back to routine, Emma unquestioning, unchanging. Unable to leave.

There was no such guarantee now, and Regina had lost too much to lean on the tentative possibility of unlikely, future forgiveness. It was bad enough that Emma hadn't passed a verdict on what had happened before - not just the curse, but all the events that followed it, the long list of petty intrusions and much larger cruelties. That Emma wasn't talking about it gave Regina some measure of comfort - wouldn't it be better to leave it all to gather dust? She was changing now, or trying to change. Why focus on what was already over with?

Regina heard her own hypocrisy in the idea and closed her eyes. She knew that the past was not a dead thing, not something that could be shelved and forgotten. She knew well from experience that old suffering followed you step by step, never ceasing its intrusions on whatever peace you'd tried to create for yourself. Pain never died, merely slept.

"Regina?" Emma said again, and Regina said, "Yes," but without inflection, trying to gather herself up from her unwanted introspection, to return to this moment with Emma. Emma's hand on her shoulder anchored her, reminding her where she was.

"Where'd you go?" Emma asked.

Regina smiled without mirth down at her cup, appreciating the nearly childish simplicity of the question. "Nowhere you'd like to visit, dear," she said.

There was silence from behind her for long enough that Regina might have thought Emma had left, if not for the hand still on her shoulder.

"You know," Emma said slowly, "it was... It was like a _week_ ago that I was convinced I hated you."

Regina swallowed, hearing _I was convinced_ and nothing more definite than that, thinking, then, that it couldn't be as terrible as it nonetheless felt.

"But... Even then..." Emma was struggling, trying to find words, reminding Regina of those tentative, troubled conversations that preceded their separation, Emma struggling then as now to vocalize feelings she'd never intended to have. "It wasn't that simple. You were still... You remember that one winter, when there was the big snowstorm and then just days and days of sleet and ice, and I got sick?"

Regina did remember. Emma had insisted, after the storm, on digging out Regina's car by herself. The red, runny nose and the stinging eyes that resulted intensified over three or four more days of unrelenting dampness and cold, until Emma was willingly spending her time folded up in her window seat, quietly snuffling, trying to stem the tears stung out of her eyes by her infected sinuses.

"You made me soup," Emma said, as though all the answers to every question she had were in those words.

"I... I did," Regina said, remembering that now too. The recipe unfolded in her mind of its own accord, a list of ingredients unspooling like the components of a memorized spell, second nature to her now that she'd spent more than twenty years in this realm.

"What kind of person does that?" Emma said wonderingly, close behind her. "I mean - you did all of this other... But you made me _soup_."

Regina thought about telling Emma she'd take that hug now, just so that she could feel held together.

"You took care of me." Emma's voice was the voice of a woman who'd never been taken care of by anyone, self-sufficient and capable but lonely. "How are you both? How are you the Evil Queen - and you're my wife?"

"You'll find that I'm a very complex woman, Emma," Regina said, her head tipped down, chin to chest. She was afraid Emma might somehow catch a glimpse of whatever was written on her face, feeling rawer than ever.

"I just don't understand," Emma said, her voice begging for explanation as though Regina had any more answers than she did. "I wish I did, but I don't."

Regina was curious about it herself. How Emma could be here after everything, the string of wrongs that knotted them together, close and killing as fate. The curse, the marriage, the missing yellow car. Graham's death. All that had come after. An apple turnover filled with poison.

What did it say about Emma that she was here after everything? Regina, at least, knew her own selfish motives. This wasn't some romantic melodrama and she had no intention of sacrificing her love for Emma for the greater moral good. She wanted Emma to stay, she wanted to be with Emma. She wanted to have her family. Her happy ending.

What was it that Emma wanted?

To understand, perhaps. Maybe this was nothing more than some transitory phase of Emma's life. Maybe she would move on to bigger and brighter things, find a prince to marry somewhere. (Regina was sure there were a few more around, working at the sanitation plant or in the dish pit at Granny's.) Whatever this was, this reconciliation, might have been nothing more than a working off of leftover emotion. Something that would come and go.

There was a sudden, warm pressure against her back. Emma's body. And a cheek pressed against her hair. "Sorry," Emma said, tensing, already pulling back halfway. Regretting the impulse? "Is this okay?"

Regina reached behind her and pulled on Emma's hip, bringing her close again. "Yes," she said. Her coffee cup joined Emma's, now discarded on the counter. They always seemed to find themselves in this kitchen.

"I don't know what to do," Emma confessed, voice low in Regina's ear. "I don't know anymore. I feel like every time I've got my life figured out, something else changes. I just want something to stick. I want it to be real."

"This is real," Regina said, lifting her hand to Emma's cheek, turning her head. Kissing her mouth and tasting desperation equal to her own, forgetting to ask permission.

"But how can you be sure?" Emma whispered against her lips, so quiet, as though afraid to be overheard.

* * *

The jangle of the bell and the rattle of the blinds signaled the room so that when Regina stepped into the diner ahead of Emma, she was pinned by a landscape of hostile stares. She didn't feel afraid - not really - but tension clawed up her spine, her skin prickling with awareness of the threat.

Emma, carrying the lasagna dish, bumped into her. "Going in?" she asked, and Regina stepped further inside, keeping a hand on the door so Emma could follow.

One of the dwarf brothers - was it Cranky? Regina'd never bothered with their names - seized a knife off the counter, holding it up as though it might _protect _him. "What is _she _-"

"Leroy," Snow said, and the dwarf fell silent, just like that. She'd always had an uncanny hold over her allies, for someone with no admirable leadership qualities. Snow's eyes passed over Regina as though she were invisible, settled on her daughter. "Emma?" Snow prompted with an expression of tender sympathy. Did she think Regina had _coerced _Emma into inviting her? Had bullied her, perhaps, into carrying the food?

"We, uh, brought lasagna," Emma said, at least putting herself on Regina's side. Regina couldn't help the victorious pride in her sideways glance as she and Emma crossed to the counter to put the dish with the rest of the food. She had to take her points where she could score them, especially after what happened before.

Emma stepped back so that Regina could step forward and peel the foil away from the top of the lasagna. She picked up a cake server from the scattered materials and started cutting portions, working at a deliberate indifference to the eyes still watching her.

There were a few telling moments where the room stayed still and silent. Gradually, some life returned, noise stirring slowly and eventually resuming a normal volume. Regina focused very hard on the lasagna when she saw the movement of a child-sized shape in her peripheral vision, afraid that if she looked up it would melt away.

"Can I have a piece?" Henry asked her, and she smiled, wider than she had in what felt like years.

"Of course," Regina said, and cut him a corner piece, his favorite. She knew all of his favorites still, his preferred ice cream, breakfast cereal, Marvel comics. That had to recommend her at least a little, coupled with what she'd done. Wasn't she the better choice? Not this pasty perfect family of so-called heroes, Charming and Snow White and their ring of allies.

Emma appeared with a mug of beer, trailed by the same dwarf who'd tried to draw a knife. Leroy.

"What's the secret ingredient?" Leroy said, picking up a plate and holding it in front of himself, glowering hatefully at her while waiting for his serving, as though she were the world's most vile cafeteria lady. "Poison?"

"Red pepper flakes," Regina said. When she and Henry had cooked together, she'd put a precise amount in a bowl and let him pour it into the meat sauce. These days, she was more carefree with her spice. "Gives it some kick."

It seemed the dwarf's willingness to be chastised extended to all women, because his expression begrudgingly gave. Regina wondered where he'd learned that; dwarves didn't have mothers, after all. He stabbed the lasagna aggressively and took a bite. Then another. Regina smiled again.

"Guess I'll take one too," Emma said, and didn't quite look at Regina when she accepted the plate of lasagna.

Regina looked hard at Emma's beer glass and thought Emma could have gotten her one, too, out of respect for the alcoholic tendencies the company brought out in her. Emma didn't seem to notice her frustration, or if she did, she ignored it, hiding behind her drink and her food. She'd always been a sulker, Regina thought, and tried to bite down on the thought so that nothing else uncharitable would come to mind.

On her other side, Henry was digging into his slice of lasagna. Regina dared to stroke the back of his head lightly, gratified when he gave her a pleased look. She could almost believe that this was a normal dinner, a normal family outing, her and Henry and Emma, the way it had been before. Though before Emma's leg would have been leaning against Regina's, her shoulder against Regina's, and a hand might have freed itself from the necessary utensils of Emma's particular brand of shovel-it-in eating to rest on Regina's thigh. Little touches that Regina would only let herself enjoy for a moment before she firmly reinforced her need for privacy.

She missed those touches even more now that Emma was so close. Perhaps Emma thought Regina'd taken her fill of touching earlier. Perhaps this was punishment.

The lasagna was almost gone from its tray when Regina took another look at Emma, who was on the other side of her, close to the wall. She'd been preoccupied with Henry, who was sticking close to her side, probably because Emma was there.

Speaking of Emma. Her wife was still sulking, casting clouds of sullen unapproachability like a teenager. Henry, catching the direction of her gaze, looked past her to Emma and frowned, no doubt trying to figure out a way to make this Regina's fault. (No. Regina would have to try harder to cut out these toxic thoughts, the flecks of poison that gave innocent moments a foul taste. She would never be candy-sweet, but she'd have to be less bitter.)

"Emma?" Regina put her hand on the countertop, keeping a careful distance of an inch or so between her hand and Emma's wrist, which under better circumstances she'd have grasped in a learned gesture of solicitous affection.

Emma seemed to start, as though roused from a daydream. "Yeah."

"If my getting shanked with a spatula would entertain you better," Regina said, "I'm sure it can be arranged."

Emma gave a surprised sound of laughter, which startled Henry into making the same. "What's 'shanked' mean?" he asked.

Emma shook her head in answer and looked down at her plate again in a way that told Regina nothing had been really accomplished.

"Henry," Regina said after a moment. "Why don't you go see when the cake is coming out?"

She heard him say "But -" and felt the tension next to her as he started to resist. Emma looked up again at her, not at Henry, and whatever he saw in the expression not meant for him made him hop down from his seat and scurry into the further part of the diner.

"Maybe we should talk outside," Regina offered.

Emma led the way and by necessity attracted attention. Snow popped her head out of the little circle she'd been in with Charming and their wolf friend and watched as though trying to pull Emma back with her eyes, or maybe push Regina away. There was a flicker of a motion from the same dwarf brother who'd taken a piece of lasagna, but when Regina glanced at him he adopted that particular posture of disgruntled outcasts, playing at disinterest.

Outside, Emma tugged her sweater sleeves down over her fingers and folded her arms over her chest. She had an expression as though she'd been caught out.

"Did you think I wouldn't notice?" Regina asked, frowning, lips pursed. She canted her head to the side for a better angle to see into Emma's face, as she'd done many times before with Henry when he refused to look at her.

"I was hoping you wouldn't say anything," Emma said. "With the kid there and all."

"You have a habit of using him to manipulate me," Regina replied, with perhaps too much of a bite, because Emma looked at her with jaw set and eyes narrowed. She didn't regret it; better an angry Emma than a silent, sullen one.

"You wanted me to come here." Regina had her hands in her pockets; when she made a gesture with one, it translated through half the fabric of her coat. "Is there some reason you're acting like this now?"

"It's not because of you," Emma said. She wrapped her sweater more tightly around herself, hesitated, then amended, "Maybe... Maybe it is." She exhaled, blowing a spiral of condensation into the air.

Regina stiffened, tongue wetting her lips briefly in memory of what happened in the kitchen. "If it's about -" she stopped, not sure how to go on. "If you want me to apologize again, I -"

"That's - no," Emma said, seeming to recognize that the impulse for apology didn't come easily to Regina. "No, it's... I don't mean it's your fault." Then she looked as though she wanted to rescind that, too, so Regina decided on a preemptive strike.

"I'm sorry for kissing you," Regina said. "Without permission."

"It's okay."

"I'm sorry for continuing to kiss you. I know it made you uncomfortable. I am _very sorry._" That had to have covered it all.

Emma frowned again, harder, hearing the quality of recitation in the words. "I think I should go."

"_Go_?" Regina tried to envision staying at the party without Emma and saw a bloodbath. "Emma, no. You cannot just slouch off like a melodramatic antihero."

"Is that what you think this is?" Emma didn't raise her voice, but her expression became flat and impenetrable. "You think this is melodrama or whatever?"

"I can't think of a single valid reason you'd have to act like an antisocial teenager," Regina said, and, lifting her chin, flicked her hair.

There was a clear falter in Emma's steely gaze, and Regina felt sick when she recognized it as the submissive impulse she'd trained into her. Emma opened her mouth and hesitated, and Regina couldn't stand it; she said, "No, I'm sorry. Emma, I am." It wasn't calculated this time.

"I didn't mean to sulk." Emma looked away from her. "That wasn't... I wasn't doing it on purpose."

"I know," Regina said. She dared a step closer, but didn't breach the boundary of Emma's personal space. "Tell me, Emma. I - please, I'll listen." The words tasted odd. She wasn't sure she'd ever said their like to Emma before, not genuinely - only when she was playing the little game of affectionate spouse, towards the end of things.

"I don't feel... Right." Emma rearranged her folded arms, tried not to look at her.

Regina, conscious of Emma's frequent struggle with words, prompted her, deliberately avoiding the thought that Snow had done the same thing earlier, coaxing Emma like a shy child. "With them?"

"With anyone."

The words swung into Regina like a thrown punch. She didn't know why - certainly if Emma didn't feel right with her real family, she wouldn't feel right with the one she was cursed to have. She parted her lips, drew in a breath, and found she didn't know what to say. Not even the platitudes of their so-called honeymoon phase seemed appropriate.

Honesty was the only thing she had, so she said, "I... I'm not sure what to tell you."

Emma ducked her head slightly. "Figured not."

"Is there..." Regina tested each word in her mind before she spoke it. "Something that... That you need from me? That you're not getting?" The questions didn't sound like her; they sounded much more like Doctor Hopper. These kinds of heart-to-heart talks - they were too many too soon, stacking precariously one on top of the other. She was worried she'd run out of genuine, heartfelt things to say.

"I don't know," Emma said. At least she was struggling as hard as Regina. "I gotta... I'm gonna leave." She started to move back, started to turn away to walk down the path from the diner, but Regina pursued.

"Emma," she said, and her voice pulled her wife back immediately, a reflex that Regina didn't want to think too hard about, unsure if its origins were good or bad. "If you..." She hesitated, not liking how uncertain she felt but not quite able to control it. "If you don't want to go back to... Them." She gave a movement of her head to indicate the roomful of people behind them, but especially Snow and Charming. She was surprised they hadn't kicked the door open to come rescue their daughter yet. "You know that..." Regina felt a smile on her lips, and also felt that it was trembling just a little. "I still have all your things."

Emma smiled back at her, just a little bit. "Yeah," she said, but she turned, and she was gone.


	5. Chapter 5

_Note: Hello again! I'm actually kind of surprised at how quickly this chapter got finished – it's much more compact than the previous one, so of necessity it's shorter, but I guess that's been made up for in speed? Ehh, I don't know. Anyway, once again, thank you so much for taking the time to read. I'm so grateful that you're giving this story your time._

_**Please be aware that this chapter deals explicitly with a sex scene of highly dubious consent, previously from Chapter 2 of Rearranging the Disaligned. The whole chapter is potentially triggering.**_

* * *

Emma'd learned to skip stones from a foster dad named Pete. They'd go to the lakeside, her and Pete and Pete's wife Rita, and she and Pete would practice by the shore as he told a crummy joke over and over again, because it had his name in it: "Pete and Re-Pete were in a boat. Pete fell in. Who was left?" She'd say, of course, "Re-Pete," and he'd tell it all over again. That was the joke. At first she'd thought he was making fun of her, until she gradually realized he was just trying to get her to relax, to maybe make her smile or laugh. She'd been about twelve and already had a chip on her shoulder bigger than the shale-flat lake itself.

At the town boundary, there was a scattering of stones by the roadside. They weren't smooth like real skipping stones, but there wasn't any water anyway.

Your wife is the Evil Queen, she said to herself. Take a shot. She skipped one stone over the town line and watched it bound unevenly away into the darkness.

Pete and Rita had been a brief pool of stillness in a life chased through with frenetic ugliness. She'd felt the same way about Regina and Henry at first, before it all went to shit.

You fell in love with the Evil Queen because she cursed you to love her, as revenge on the parents she stole you from with the curse _before _the curse to love her. Take a shot.

Another rock went over the boundary of spray paint.

You're in love with a woman who has killed a lot of people and made a lot of other people suffer. She hasn't confirmed or denied it, but she probably murdered your friend Graham. Take a shot.

This rock went over harder and louder, and shot off in an arc into the night, passing brief and pale like something dumb and poetic. A shooting star maybe.

You're in love with a woman who made your life a living hell after you left her. You're in love with a woman who scared you and hurt you. You're in love with a woman who made you uncomfortable with your own body because of how she used it. You're in love with a woman who tried to poison you with the same apple she used to poison your mother.

That was four shots. Four rocks went down the road, one after the other.

No more. She went back to the boundary between asphalt and forest.

She counted what was left. One: you're in love with a woman who wasn't _so _bad when she first cursed you to be her wife. Two: you're in love with the mother of your child, which was more than most people could say. Three: at least she's apologized and keeps apologizing.

Four, the look in her eyes when she told you the same thing had been done to her. Five, the way she clearly needs you.

The way she kissed you today in the kitchen, like you were the only person in the world she ever wanted to kiss.

The way your body seized up with fright at the touch of her lips.

Take a shot.

Six stones stayed on the ground, but the seventh she wound up and threw like a pitcher, thinking that the tense-and-release would do something to fix the remembered fear and discomfort that was clawing its way up her body. It didn't do anything more than overbalance her. She sat down hard on the ground next to Mary Margaret's car, which she was borrowing while she tried to track down her Beetle.

She picked up one of the six remaining rocks and flung that after the seventh, in memory of her lost car. Then she put her head down on her knees and breathed deep.

It wasn't so bad, not anymore. If she initiated the touches, she was fine. It had even felt kind of good and secure to hold Regina in her arms. Being the big spoon and stuff. Even the first kiss - not _so _bad, because she did kind of see it coming. But when Regina didn't stop... Emma closed her eyes as tension gripped her limbs anew.

For the few scattered weeks that their marriage clung together after _that _night, Emma had thought she was, you know, over it. It had been shitty and made her feel kind of sick to think about, but Regina didn't demand much by way of intimacy in the days leading up to Graham's death. There'd been no forceful kisses waking Emma at two in the morning, no hand fisting in her hair so she could bend Emma where she wanted her.

Emma rubbed a hand over her face and wondered exactly when their sex had gone from mutual and eager and even occasionally tender to a whole lot of Regina pushing Emma around. She guessed, by that time, she'd been well enough trained to submit, but at least that had been a choice she made, not something wrenched out of her by force.

_By force. _She squeezed her eyes shut tight, feeling the memory of that night pulse like a bruise. _No, please, can we not do this right now_, but it rose to the front of her awareness, a chronic pain she couldn't medicate.

Regina kissing her insistently, laying on top of her. Weirdly heavy, though her weight had never been much to Emma before. Pushing up her sweater to grope her breasts, using mouth and teeth the way Emma liked.

Emma felt almost nothing at all as Regina was doing it, but her body responded just enough, in little twitches and gasps, to convince Regina that she was playing hard to get. Regina'd even chuckled around the nipple between her lips, clearly believing this was some game of Emma's, to taunt her. She made Emma come, a weak little thing, a reflex of her body like the kick of a leg after a tap to the knee. Just an answer of her muscles to the insistent pressure of Regina's fingers.

Then Regina took her robe off. Emma knew what was expected of her, so she did it, feeling nothing.

She didn't know if she'd _expected _to feel something by then - like maybe her engine just needed warming up and now she'd kick right into gear. She'd always loved Regina's body, after all. She'd learned its secrets, the birthmarks, the little ticklish places; had she thought that night, carrying out by rote what normally was done with love, that somehow a switch would flip and life would come back to her again? She must have been neck-deep in the pretense already. In pretending to be okay.

Emma shivered back into herself, realizing that the cold rocky pavement was digging into her ass through her jeans. Her head had dropped all the way down in remembering, she could feel the stretch in the back of her neck.

She unbent herself gradually. Being sexless after she left Regina hadn't been bad - who was she gonna have sex with, right? And that night only came back to her once in a while, only froze her in shards in moments like outside the mine, the time that Henry, desperate to prove that _something _in his collapsing life was real, got himself stuck underground, and Regina - Jesus, why did she do it? Why did Regina do _anything_? Probably to manipulate her. Regina had crossed the gap between them as Emma prepared to harness up and go down the airshaft, and she got so close that everything in Emma went tight and painful and afraid. And Regina just looked at her with dazzling harlequin romance eyes and asked her to bring Henry back, seeming so outside the fist squeezing Emma's insides that Emma could almost believe she wasn't the cause of it.

Emma brushed off her jeans, then leaned heavily against the side of the car, looking not ahead of her but down the road, over the line, out of the town. She'd always thought of Regina as being a hundred different people at once, putting on a different face for every different situation, never showing her real self. Was there even a real Regina, at the bottom of it all, trapped underwater like the ghost of someone drowned? Could you swim deep enough and find her?

Emma's legs hurt now, and so did her ass. It was cold enough out to seep in through the knit of her sweater; she wrapped her arms around herself, shivered. Better get home, she thought, and wondered where home was these days, anyway. The party had to be over by now.

She glanced over the line and thought about all the rocks piled on that side, more there than where she was. She could follow them, if she wanted. Get in and keep driving. As easy as that.

* * *

Regina cut her eyes at Emma from across the piano room to hear the words, pursing her lips. Emma could have predicted that expression down to the slight narrowing of Regina's eyes, and took some kind of comfort in it; through good stuff and bad stuff some things never changed.

"Emma," Regina said, "leaving is not an option for you anymore." She passed Emma one of the glasses of cider.

"I know," Emma said. "I mean - I'm here, aren't I?" She had never much liked Regina's cider, but drinking it felt like sealing a pact, and that was what she wanted to do. Make a pact to stay. She took a swallow, grimaced slightly at the burn of the alcohol.

Regina sat on the other end of the couch, smoothing a crease out of her silk pajamas. "I didn't expect you to come back here," she said. "It's late." The clock on the far wall said nearly one in the morning. It had a steady metronomic tick that meted out the time beneath the soft pattern of their voices.

"You weren't asleep," Emma said in her defense, and instead of asking how the end of the party went, she took a sip of cider. She flicked her gaze up at Regina, who wasn't looking at her, and who was unfairly flattered by the dim light, the way she was always flattered by any light; Emma didn't look down in time to miss the slightly uncertain look Regina sent her, disguised in a frown.

"Is there something you wanted, Miss Swan?" Regina said; her expression seemed to twitch, as though even she recognized the ridiculousness of her old habit.

Emma tried to find somewhere safe to put her eyes, but they kept getting snagged on little details. The perfectly smooth glass top of the coffee table and the shelf beneath it, which had a neat arrangement of Henry's comic books, as though he might still wander in and scoop one up to relax after school. The array of family photos near the television, mostly Henry and Regina, but there was one with Emma too, taken, maybe, to convince her of the reality of the whole magical charade. Her and Regina and the kid at the summer fair that sprawled across the docks every year, and not the most attractive picture, either, because when it got sunny Emma wore a permanent scowl as self-defense and was squinting distrustfully at the camera as though to ask "You want a piece of me?" Henry had a swath of sunburn across his nose. Only Regina looked put-together.

Emma pulled her eyes away from that and then they got caught on how Regina wasn't wearing any shoes or socks or anything, and how vulnerable she looked with her feet exposed. She shook her head at herself, took another swallow of cider. It seemed to chafe in her stomach. She should have eaten more at the party.

_Is there something you wanted, Miss Swan? _Not a bad question, even if it still sounded dumb when Regina called her Miss Swan. Emma looked down at her glass - finally somewhere to look with neutral implications - and tried to find the right words, to explain.

"I feel like..." Her brow furrowed, her eyelids flickering briefly down, giving herself a moment of rest. "Like there's so much... People expect of me." She remembered the kid at the well with her. Realizing only in retrospect that he'd called her Mom then, and it still sent a weird, sickly shudder through her to think about, the feeling too heavy in her throat to be happiness.

"I mean, when I was doing that whole - when I was the sheriff, and you and I were fighting, I was... None of it was planned." She brushed her thumb over the rim of the glass and chanced a look up at Regina just as she was wetting her lower lip nervously with her tongue, something so innocent and vulnerable, like the bare feet; she felt like she was peeking in on a scene not meant for her, especially when Regina rearranged her expression so quickly Emma knew that she wasn't supposed to have seen.

"The whole time, it was just..." Emma fished for the precise word she wanted, came up with it: "Improvisation. I... I was just fucking around, not knowing what I was doing, with any of it. With being sheriff - being the Savior. Being Henry's - his other mother. I was just rolling with the punches. None of it was instinct, or talent, or anything. Just me... Trying really hard." She'd never said any of this aloud before, never admitted to anyone, and, shit, was she going to cry? She frowned really hard down at her cider glass, hoping she wouldn't.

"There's so much... So much... _Sitting _on me." Emma bit the inside of her mouth, another safeguard against tears. "Snow and Charming expect me to be their daughter and everyone expects me to be the Savior and Henry - Henry expects me to be his _Mom_, and I just, I don't, I _can__'t._"She looked up at Regina, but when she blinked her vision was rimmed with prisms of refracted light; she _was _crying, or at least there were tears in her eyes. She felt sick, and she felt weak.

"I don't even have _myself_figured out," Emma said urgently, trying to make Regina understand, so at least one person would know the truth and Emma wouldn't have to carry it alone. "There's this, there's all of this _history_that's on me here, I haven't got _any _of it figured out. I feel like..." She lifted a hand from her glass, wiped hard at her eyes. "If I could just figure it out... How all the pieces fit together..."

"You'd understand who you are," Regina said, looking down at her hands, not at Emma. Regina's cider glass was on the table, on a coaster. "If you could just understand how one thing led to another, you'd understand yourself."

"You get it," Emma said, not quite a question but neither a statement, and there was a wobble in her voice that she hated; shame prickled at her as badly as the tears did.

Regina suddenly looked small, sitting on the far side of the couch, just a slim woman in a pair of pajamas with mussed hair and bare feet. Her hands shaped themselves as though holding something fragile as she spoke softly: "How do you... Unlink one event from another, Emma? How do you uncouple the regret of one moment from the happiness of another?" Regina swallowed; her mouth was taut, the scar on her upper lip in sharp relief, that one crooked eyebrow nearing its twin unevenly across her furrowed brow. Emma recognized the vein in her forehead from moments of anger but knew this to be a profound sadness instead, something from the dark inner forest of Regina that she couldn't touch.

"I don't think you can," Regina said softly. "You can't make sense of it. It's not as simple as saying... As saying _because _or _er__go._" There was the faintest tinge of bitterness in her voice now, manifesting also in the way Regina's lower lip pulled up, against tears, Emma realized - Regina was crying too, or about to cry. In sympathy for Emma?

Emma closed her eyes and stayed that way for what felt like a long time. This time, when she spoke, she asked the question that had sat in her since the town line, the history that crushed her most of all.

"Do you remember that night?" Emma said. "The night when you... Made me..." She took a long breath, and at the end of it, looked at Regina. She hadn't thought the grief on Regina's face could grow any deeper, but it had, and her eyes were like wells to drown in.

"Yes," Regina said, just the one word, very quietly.

"I feel like if I could just... If I could understand _that_..." Emma struggled, and had to put down her glass, because her hands were shaking, more than a little. She didn't know how to explain that that night had been so pivotal to her, that it marked some kind of before and after in her life. If that night had never happened, would she ever have challenged Regina about their marriage? Would she have gotten her old job back, and would Graham...?

"Sometimes things happen to us that make no sense," Regina said, and her voice sounded ashen and dead, so bereft of the sarcasm and the acidity that normally seared the edges of their conversations. "Sometimes terrible things are - done to us. And they make us who we are. And they have no purpose, no meaning. Except to be wounds that never close."

Emma was really crying now, she couldn't pretend not to be. She wanted to throw up, like she could purge the feeling out of herself. It sat in her belly like a stone. "How do you live with it?" she asked, her voice ragged. "How am I supposed to live with it?"

"Day by day," Regina said. "You fight. Even though it might kill you anyway." Her voice was soft, very soft, and Emma wanted to reach out to her, to the person who hurt her most and understood her best.

Instead, Emma scrubbed her hands fiercely over her eyes, over her wet cheeks, and tried to make herself as small as she could when she heard Regina say, her voice thick with pain, "I'm sorry. If it's any - use to you. I'm sorry. I... I love you." It had been a long time since Regina said that to her, and the words resonated in Emma like the aftermath of thunder.

Regina continued, her voice a throaty rasp, as though shredded by what she felt. "... But even the people I love aren't safe from me."

Emma swallowed. She made herself drag her head up, look at Regina, whose head had dropped forward; shadows spilled over her face from the light in the hall that silhouetted her, as though a conscious defense, a disguise.

"How did you get like this?" Emma asked, not for the first time.

Regina told her.


End file.
